(Mrs. Manson brings a large tasselled fez of brilliant colour, and adjusts it to his head while he drinks.  She then, goes to the door, takes a hot-water bottle from the bands of an unseen servant and effects the necessary changes.  All this is done so unobtrusively that the Statesman resumes his theme without regarding her.  When she has done she goes.)

Ah!  Where was I?

DOCTOR.  If you “could understand,” you said.

STATESMAN.  Ah, yes; understand.  Again a strange faculty of divination came upon me.  I stood upon the international plane, amid a congress of Powers, and let my eye travel once more over the Alliances of Europe.  I looked, Doctor, and truly I saw, then, surprising shifts and changes in the political and diplomatic fabric which I had helped to frame.  Time, and kingdoms had passed.  I saw, at home and abroad, the rise of new parties into power, strange coalitions, defections, alliances; old balances destroyed, new balances set up in their place.  I saw frontiers annulled, treaties violated, world-problems tumbling like clowns, standing on their heads and crying, “Here we are again!” Power—­after all, had solved nothing!

My eye travelled over that problem of the Near East, which, for some generations at least, we thought to have settled, to Vienna, Petersburg, Constantinople—­and away farther East to Teheran and—­that other place whose name I have forgotten.  And, as I looked, a Recording Angel came, and cried to me in a voice strangely familiar, the voice of one of my most detested colleagues—­trusted, I mean—­“You have put your money on the wrong horse!”

And I had, Doctor; if what I saw then was true—­I had!  Yes, if ever man blundered and fooled his countrymen into a false and fatal position—­I was that man!  It wasn’t a question of right or wrong.  In politics that doesn’t really matter; you decide on a course, and you invent moral reasons for it afterwards.  No, what I had done was much worse than any mere wrongdoing.  All my political foresight and achievements were a gamble that had gone wrong; and for that my Day of Judgment had come, and I stood in the pillory, a peepshow for mockery.  But why for their instrument of torture did they choose primroses?  Oh, I can invent a reason!  It was Moses Primrose, cheated of his horse with a gross of green spectacles cased in shagreen.  But that was not the reason.  For then came new insight, and a fresh humiliation.  As I looked more intently I saw that I was not being mocked; I was being worshipped, adulated, flattered; I had become a god—­for party purposes perhaps—­and this was my day, given in my honour, for national celebration.  And I saw, by the insight given me, that they were praising me for having put their money on the wrong horse! Year by year the celebration had gone on, until they had so got into the habit that they could not leave off!  All my achievements, all my policies, all my statecraft were in the dust; but the worship of me had become a national habit—­so foolish and meaningless, that nothing, nothing but some vast calamity—­some great social upheaval, was ever going to stop it.